The Great Fire of London
Exactly 350 years ago this month, a conflagration destroyed most of the medieval City of London
How did the fire begin?
As everyone knows, it started at a bakery in Pudding Lane. Thomas Farriner made ship’s biscuit (sometimes known as hard tack) for the Navy and lived above his shop. It caught fire some time early on the morning of Sunday 2 September 1666. Farriner, his daughter and a servant had to climb out of an upstairs window into a neighbour’s house to safety; Farriner’s maid, who stayed behind, was the fire’s first victim. Pudding Lane was a tinderbox: a narrow street by the Thames, with timber-framed houses whose upper floors jutted out so far into the road that their eaves almost touched the opposite houses. The City as a whole was, in the words of the diarist John Evelyn, “a wooden, northern and inartificial [makeshift] congestion of houses”. And conditions were perfect for a fire: the summer of 1666 had been long and hot, and there was a strong easterly gale blowing. Nevertheless, it should have been contained.
How could it have been stopped?
Fires were common in English towns at the time, and there were established protocols for dealing with them. Neighbours were alerted and evacuated; church bells were rung “backwards” (their peals muffled). Local officials sprang into action. Chains of men were meant to assemble and pass leather buckets full of water from the Thames to the source of the fire. Ladders were kept in parish churches, along with fire hooks – heavy poles used to grab the timber of burning houses, or those surrounding ones, and bring them down to stop the fire spreading. There were also newfangled fire engines: large sledges manned by ten or so men, carrying a reservoir of water, a pump and a brass delivery pipe.
So why did the fire spread?
History has blamed Sir Thomas Bludworth, the then lord mayor of London, who was in charge of firefighting. When constables sought his permission to pull down unaffected buildings in Pudding Lane to create a firebreak, he refused, concerned about having to pay compensation to the owners. He insisted the fire was so weak that “a woman might piss it out”. The next day, when King Charles II sent Samuel Pepys to order him to “spare no houses but to pull down before the fire every way”, Bludworth suffered a total loss of nerve. He behaved, wrote Pepys, “like a fainting woman”. “Lord, what can I do? I am spent,” he said, before retiring to “refresh himself, having been up all night”.
Where did the fire spread?
Fanned by the easterly wind, the fire spread to adjoining Fish Street Hill and Thames Street, and then to the wharves along the river where stocks of flammable goods – coal, wood, oil, animal fats – had been stored for the coming winter. By Sunday morning, it had become a firestorm, which advanced 30 yards per hour downwind, and, more slowly, upwind to the east. Pepys wept as he watched from the South Bank, and saw “one entire arch of fire” of “above a mile long”. To take action against it was difficult, particularly since evacuees filled the streets, taking their worldly goods with them. The Duke of York, Charles II’S brother, gathered teams of firefighters in the west, while military engineers blew up many houses around the Tower of London, to stop the fire reaching its large supplies of gun powder. Yet it continued to rage until the wind dropped, late on Wednesday 5 September. By then the city had burned from the Tower in the east to Temple in the west and Moorfields in the north: a total of 436 acres.
How much damage was done?
A subsequent survey found that 13,200 houses were destroyed, along with 87 churches, six chapels, 52 livery companies’ halls, the Royal Exchange, the Custom House and Newgate Prison. Around 80,000 Londoners – from a population of perhaps 380,000 – were made homeless. “Of particular men’s losses could never be made any computation,” said the Earl of Clarendon. In 1681, the damage was estimated at £10m overall (Pepys paid his cook £5 a year). Especially painful was the destruction of the old St Paul’s Cathedral, thought safe because of its thick stone walls and large yard. But the wooden scaffolding to the side of it caught fire, then the roof, and – with a huge roar – the stationers’ books and paper, stored in St Faith’s crypt. The lead from the roof melted and ran down Ludgate Hill, reported John Evelyn – “the very pavements glowing with fiery rednesse”.
How many people died?
According to Adrian Tinniswood, author of an acclaimed study of the fire, the number of deaths was “tiny”. A pamphlet published soon after suggested there were only half a dozen deaths: a deaf watchmaker who refused to leave his house, a man who dropped dead from fright on Tower Hill, and a handful of others. Other historians, such as Neil Hanson, have suggested that the death toll was more likely to be several hundred, possibly even thousands. Official accounts say little about the poor, who lived in rotten houses: the fire was hot enough to melt the steel on the wharves, so it might have left no remains of the dead. And many deaths were thought to have been caused indirectly, among those left homeless. But either way, the death toll was nothing compared to the one-fifth of Londoners killed by the plague of 1665.
How did people react to the fire?
At the time, England was at war with the Dutch, and arson by foreigners was widely suspected: many were attacked, especially Dutchmen and Frenchmen. Robert Hubert, a Rouen man described as “not well in mind”, was hanged on the basis of his, later disproved, claim to have started it. The Great Fire, like the plague, was widely seen as divine retribution. Some puritan preachers had warned that a fiery fate awaited the godless city; even Evelyn, a royalist and an Anglican, thought it was “what we highly deserved for our prodigious ingratitude, burning lusts, dissolute court, profane and abominable lives”. Others, however, took a more practical approach (see box).